Safe Harbor Statement: The information on IBM products is intended to outline IBM's general product direction and it should not be relied on in making a purchasing decision. The information on the new products is for informational purposes only and may not be incorporated into any contract. The information on IBM products is not a commitment, promise, or legal obligation to deliver any material, code, or functionality. The development, release, and timing of any features or functionality described for IBM products remains at IBM's sole discretion.

Tony Pearson is a an active participant in local, regional, and industry-specific interests, and does not receive any special payments to mention them on this blog.

Tony Pearson receives part of the revenue proceeds from sales of books he has authored listed in the side panel.

Tony Pearson is not a medical doctor, and this blog does not reference any IBM product or service that is intended for use in the diagnosis, treatment, cure, prevention or monitoring of a disease or medical condition, unless otherwise specified on individual posts.

Inside System Storage -- by Tony Pearson

Tony Pearson is a Master Inventor and Senior Software Engineer for the IBM Storage product line at the
IBM Executive Briefing Center in Tucson Arizona, and featured contributor
to IBM's developerWorks. In 2016, Tony celebrates his 30th year anniversary with IBM Storage. He is
author of the Inside System Storage series of books. This blog is for the open exchange of ideas relating to storage and storage networking hardware, software and services. You can also follow him on Twitter @az990tony.
(Short URL for this blog: ibm.co/Pearson
)

This week, IBM announces that it now supports 50GB Solid State Disk (SSD) in its [IBM System Storage EXP3000] disk systems.IBM has already made announcements about SSD enablement in the DS8000 and SAN Volume Controller (SVC), but now the EXP3000 brings SSD technology down to smaller System x server deployments.

Adoption of this new exciting technology is still in the early stages, despite the fact that IBM and other vendors have been touting this technology for a while. (For a quick blast to the past, here was my first post on the subject back from December 20, 2006: [Hybrid, Solid State and the future of RAID])Recently, fellow blogger BarryB admitted that EMC have only sold SSD to [hundreds of their customers], and to be fair, I suspect IBM's sales of SSD in its BladeCenter servers [available since July 2007] have been in similar single-digit percentage territory as well.

The advantage of today's announcement is that you can mix and match SSD drives with SAS and SATA drives in the EXP3000. You won't have to buy the entire drawer of SSD, you can start with just a few, depending on your business needs. On the other extreme, you can have up to two drawers, with 12 SSD drives each, for a total of 24 drives directly attached to System x servers via the ServeRAID MR10M SAS/SATA controller adapter.

People are confused over various orders of magnitude. News of the economic meltdownoften blurs the distinction between millions (10^6), billions (10^9), and trillions (10^12).To show how different these three numbers are, consider the following:

A million seconds ago - you might have received your last paycheck (12 days)

A billion seconds ago - you were born or just hired on your current job (31 years)

A trillion seconds ago - cavemen were walking around in Asia (31,000 years)

That these numbers confuse the average person is no surprise, but that it confuses marketing people in the storage industry is even more hilarious. I am often correcting people who misunderstandMB (million bytes), GB (billion bytes) and TB (trillion bytes) of information.Take this graph as an example from a recent presentation.

At first, it looks reasonable, back in 2004, black-and-white 2D X-Ray images were only 1MBin size when digitized, but by 2010 there will be fancy 4D images that now take 1TB, representinga 1000x increase. What?When I pointed out this discrepancy, the person who put this chart together didn't know what to fix.Were 4D images only 1GB in size, or was it really a 1000000x increase.

If a 2D image was 1000 by 1000 pixels, each pixel was a byte of information, then a 3D imagemight either be 1000 by 1000 by 1000 [voxels], or 1000 by 1000 at 1000 frames per second (fps). Thefirst being 3D volumetric space, and the latter called 2D+time in the medical field, the rest of us just say "video".4D images are 3D+time, volumetric scans over time, so conceivably these could be quite large in size.

The key point is that advances in medical equipment result in capturing more data, which canhelp provide better healthcare. This would be the place I normally plug an IBM product, like the Grid Medical Archive Solution [GMAS], a blended disk and tape storage solution designed specifically for this purpose.

So, as government agencies look to spend billions of dollars to provide millions of peoplewith proper healthcare, choosing to spend some of this money on a smarter infrastructure can result in creating thousands of jobs and save everyone a lot of money, but more importantly, save lives.

For more on this, check out Adam Christensen's blog post on[Smarter Planet], which points to a podcast byDr. Russ Robertson, chairman of the Counsel of Medical Education at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine, and Dan Pelino, general manager of IBM's Healthcare and Life Sciences Industry.

An avid reader of this blog pointed me to a blog post [A Small Tec DIGG on IBM XIV], byGowri Ananthan, a System Engineer in Singapore.Basically, she covers past battles, er.. discussions between me and fellow blogger BarryB from EMC, and [blegs] foranswers to three questions.

PAYGO also requires the customer to purchase the remaining capacity within 12 months of installation. So it is More of a 12-month installment plan than pay-as-you-grow.

A1. Actually, IBM offers several methods for your convenience:

With IBM's Capacity on Demand (CoD) plan, you get the full framewith 15 modules installed on your data center floor, but only pay for the first four modules 21 TB, then pay for 5.3TB module increments as you need them over the next 12 months. This is ideal for companies that don't know how fast they will grow, but do not want to wait for new modules to be delivered and installed when needed.

With IBM's Partial Rack offering, you can get a system with as little as six modules (27TB),and then over time, add more modules as you need. This does not have to be done within 12 months, you can stay at six modules for as long as you like, and you can take as long asyou want to add more modules. When you are ready for more capacity, the drawer or drawerscan be delivered, and installed non-disruptively.

Neither of these are "payment installment plans", but certainly if you want to spread yourcosts into regularly-scheduled monthlypayments across multiple years, IBM Global Financing can probably work something out.

Q2. Does IBM consider the XIV as green storage?

The concern was expressed as:

You are powering (8.4KW) and cooling all 180 drives for the whole duration, whether you're using the capacity or not. is it what you called Greener power usage..?

A2. Yes. IBM considers the IBM XIV as green storage. The 8.4KW per frame is lessthan the 10-plus KW that a comparable 2-frame EMC DMX-950 system would consume. Theenergy savings in IBM XIV comes from delivering FC-like speeds using slower SATA disks that rotate slower, and therefore take less energy to spin.

In the fully-populated or Capacity on Demand configuration, you would spin all 180disks. However, using the partial rack configuration, the 6-module has only 40 percent ofthe disks, and therefore consumes only 40 percent of the energy. If you don't plan to storeat least 20-30 TB, you might consider the DS3000, DS4000, DS5000, or DS8000 disk system instead.

Q3. How do you connect more than 24 host ports to an IBM XIV?

The concern was expressed as:

And finally do not forget my question on 24-FC Ports… Up to 24 Fiber Channel ports offering 4 Gbps, 2Gbps or 1 Gbps multi-mode and single-mode support.Stop.. stop.. how you gonna squeeze existing bunch of FC cables in 24 ports?

A3. Best practices suggest that if you have ten or more physical servers, each with two separate FC ports, then you should use a SAN switch or director in between. If you require four ports per server, then you would need a SAN switch beyond six servers to connect to the IBM XIV. If you consider that 24 FC ports, at 4Gbps, represents nearly 10 GB/sec of bandwidth, you will recognize that this is not a performance bottleneck for the system.

Wrapping up this week's theme on IBM's Dynamic Infrastructure® strategic initiative, we have a few more goodies in the goody bag.

First item: Dave Bricker shows off the XIV cloud-optimized storage at Pulse 2009

Second item: Rodney Dukes discusses the latest features of the DS8000 disk system at Pulse 2009

Third item: IBM launches the [Dynamic Infrastructure Journal]. You can read the February 2009 edition online, and if you find it useful and interesting, subscribe to learn from IBM's transformation experts how to reduce cost, manage risk and improve service.

Whether or not you attended the IBM Pulse 2009 conference, you might enjoy looking at the rest of the series of videos on [YouTube] and photographs on [Flickr].